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“Commander, she’s dying.”
“We have to hurry,” T’Pol said. In the five hours since the away team came down with an alien virus, she hadn’t visited Hoshi once, nor spoken a word to her, and now she was dying. They finally found a cure, and now she was dying.
T’Pol clutched Hoshi’s limp body to her chest as she carried her. Hoshi was something special, by both Vulcan standards and Human ones. T’Pol wasn’t sure she would ever again meet anyone like her. Yet she was losing this irreplaceable woman to an ordinary virus.
In sickbay, she laid her on the biobed. With a clumsy EV glove, she brushed hair out of her face. Her lips were blue-grey. She wasn’t breathing.
T’Pol reached for the doctor’s resuscitation kit. Clumsily struggled to open it. With a sharp breath, she pried apart the seals of her gloves.
“What are you doing?”
“I can’t resuscitate her with gloves on,” she said, breaking the seal, exposing herself to the virus. She had needed to be healthy to work on a cure. Now, it didn’t matter. She should have died in Hoshi’s place.
T’Pol knew the procedure, in theory. She unzipped Hoshi’s uniform. Her fingers traced Hoshi’s stomach as she unbuttoned her shirt underneath. One cardiac stimulator lead went to the right of her sternum; the other, just below the curve of her left breast. She pointed a long, thin needle toward her heart, quickly slid it in, and counted the seconds while its life-returning purple fluid spread.
“Clear!” Phlox pressed the button. As pulses of electricity shot through Hoshi, her back arched, like an image T’Pol saw in a human cathedral of a saint being lifted to heaven. She didn’t stir. He increased the voltage again, and again, and still it was fruitless.
“You have to keep going,” T’Pol pleaded.
“Last one.”
Hoshi jolted, erratically. The probes on her skin smelled of seared flesh. It reminded T’Pol of the captain's dining room when Chef made his blackened steak. She might leave the room if he ever served it again.
Phlox shook his head. “She’s gone. Time of death: 1111 hours.”
Hoshi was so young. She had so many worlds left to visit, so many languages left to decipher. T’Pol had intentions to introduce her to her mother. To marry her, whether or not her people approved. T’Pol stroked her face. Her spirit, that essence that made her more vibrant and beautiful than the stars twinkling in a desert night sky, wasn’t anywhere to be found; there was just cooling, dying flesh, limp in her arms as T’Pol scooped her up again, suddenly understanding why Klingons wail their sorrow.